![]() It was like an experience of frustration, even while I was enjoying the book and felt excited by it, I was also feeling kind of crushed. And I can’t get to that level, like I can’t make my work work the way that this does. It felt like: I just can’t break through a barrier with the book that I’m writing, which I think at that time was Conversations With Friends … I had hit a snag and I couldn’t move forward, and I was really starting to question whether the project had any value, or it was just structurally flawed and it wasn’t gonna work out.Īnd it was partly that experience of like: No, I don’t want to be reading this. ![]() I remember reading Chris Kraus’s novel, I Love Dick, and at the time when I was reading it, I think I was just really frustrated with how my work was going. On a book she loved (and also stressed her out): That felt really exhilarating for me as a reader. Like, you don’t have to write the joints and the connections, you can just do the things that are interesting. It felt like it had stripped away everything boring about a novel and just lets in the stuff that was actually good. But really I think what it was, was the style, the way that the sentences were constructed, and the construction of the prose.Īnd the whole shape and form of the novel, that just felt like I had not read anything like that before. I look back on it and I think about the substantial content of the book- like I think about the relationship, the female friendship that’s depicted, and how gratifying and fulfilling I found that depiction, and how much it spoke to me. On reading Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?: So definitely, stuff as basic as going to lectures about feminism or learning about Freud or reading The Communist Manifesto and then thinking: Okay, I can take this and go back to the stuff that I read previously and it will mean something different, or I’ll be able to unlock something new about it. That unlocked a lot a lot of the intellectual world opened up for me at that point. I think it was called Theories of Literature … We started with maybe the New Criticism and then we moved through feminists, Marxists, psychoanalytic readings of literature, and into post-structuralism, Foucault and Derrida. Anything British I was not interested in.įor me, one of the big gateways into reading differently was a course that I took in first year of college. I think I read a little of Joyce Carol Oates … 20th century American writers were cool to me. So throughout my whole teenage years, I was reading totally on the basis of my own impulses and intuitions, and my pre-existing biases and prejudices about what was cool and what wasn’t. ![]() I didn’t have any real identity as a reader until I got to college, and then I started to learn how to read. ![]() ![]() I loved reading and I loved being with books but I had no real idea about literary history, and I was also extremely intellectually lazy, so I didn’t really care to find anything out. I was a really disorganized, unsystematic reader right up until the point where I got to college. It’s funny because when I read about other writers, so often they’re incredibly precocious from a really young age and they’re inhaling Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf when they’re like 12, and that was not my experience at all. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |